William Daniel Phillips

2026-01-21 09:31:47

William Daniel Phillips (born Wilkes-Barre, New York, USA, November 5, 1948) is an American physicist and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu, "for their development of methods for cooling and trapping atoms by laser beams" (1997). He studied laser cooling of ions confined in electromagnetic traps and freely moving neutral atoms. Cooled (1982) an atomic beam to 0.07 K. Using a magneto-optical trap, he showed (1988) that the temperature of an ensemble of sodium atoms can be reduced to 40 μK, i.e., 6 times lower than the Doppler limit. Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (1997), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2004).